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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/22497877">Meditation</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/Blake/pseuds/Blake'>Blake</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>Grace and Frankie (TV)</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Bisexual Frankie, F/F, First Time, Lesbian Grace, One Shot, Season/Series 06 Spoilers, Sexy Times, closeting</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-01-31</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2020-01-31</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-04-28 17:07:11</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>Explicit</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>No Archive Warnings Apply</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>2,964</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/22497877</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/Blake/pseuds/Blake</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>It’s not that she’s lied to herself about her desires her whole life, not exactly.</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Relationships:</b></td><td>Frankie Bergstein/Grace Hanson</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>12</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>101</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>Meditation</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>I love them so much and can't stop thinking about them after the latest season. I want to write so much about them all being roommates!</p><p>warnings for I guess this is technically cheating? Don't know if it counts if your husband is in prison for being a shitty person. Also Frankie says some less than sensitive shit, so if you're particularly affected by well-intentioned homophobia, you've been warned. Lastly, there's discussion of a lifetime of repression and missing out on your desires, which made my wife cry a lot, so I am also warning about that.</p><p>Thanks for reading and commenting!</p>
    </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>“Pass me the popcorn,” Frankie asks with her big-girl words even though she’s clearly getting her point across by reaching past Grace’s personal space and making grabby hands. Grace hums thoughtfully to herself, observing and cataloging all the places their bodies are touching and willing herself to relax into them instead of resisting. She grabs the bowl off the end table with her free hand and puts it in the small space on the couch between her lap and Frankie’s.</p><p>“Do you think you put enough butter on that?” Grace watches Frankie’s fingers get shiny with it as she brings bulky handfuls to her mouth.</p><p>Frankie points a greasy hand at the television. “When it comes to a young Marlon Brando, I am always going to need more butter.”</p><p>Grace snorts, curling the hand that’s between them in the extra folds of Frankie’s shawl, where there’s always enough excess fabric that the twisting goes unnoticed. She turns her eyes to the movie without really seeing anything. She doesn’t have the attention span for movies anymore. She doesn’t have the attention span for much of anything. Even just sitting here on the couch with Frankie, martini in hand and nothing on her to-do list, she has to force herself into stillness. Maybe this is what meditating is supposed to be like.</p><p>“Ah, put him behind bars.” Frankie thrusts a hand toward the tv, but stops short before letting the popcorn fly at the screen, an awkward, aborted motion.</p><p>Grace swallows the vodka that’s still sitting in her mouth, feels her limbs sink deeper into the cushions. “Did you stop because you knew I’d throttle you for getting butter on the floor- <i>again</i>- or because you suddenly remembered that it’s insensitive to bring up the subject of incarceration?” She’s constantly amazed by how steady her own voice is when talking about Nick being in prison. Maybe the act of being constantly amazed by the steadiness of your own voice is what meditating is supposed to be like.</p><p>Frankie offers a sheepish smile and snuggles her head against Grace’s shoulder instead of answering. Grace inhales the complex smell of her hair, easily deciphering the different notes of ylang ylang conditioner, sea-air salt, acrylic paint, and natural scalp oils.</p><p>It’s only been three weeks, and Grace can’t even recall the smell of Nick’s hair gel.</p><p>It’s weird, being someone’s wife, but having zero wifely duties to fulfill, such as remembering the smell of her husband’s hair gel. It’s like being retired from a job she didn’t even realize was a job. Every time she goes to pluck her eyebrows or order a salad, she realizes there is nobody she has to impress, which makes her realize how much work she’s been doing her whole life to impress people.</p><p>Or maybe she’s known how much work she was doing, but she’d never once been able to imagine the possibility of not doing it. When Robert left her, she had to keep working to find a new husband. When she had a new husband, she had to keep working to keep him interested. With Nick gone, but still her husband, she has no goal to aim for, no tasks to complete to achieve a new step.</p><p>She just has herself, and Frankie, and the harrowing knowledge that she’ll never feel alone as long as Frankie is by her side, eating greasy popcorn on their overly comfortable couch.</p><p>She has nothing to observe and analyze aside from herself: the set of her joints against various surfaces, the way her breath fills out against her various waistbands, the comforting cold ache of a martini glass against her fingers, the passage of salty air through her sinuses, the warmth of Frankie’s body against hers, the scrape of Frankie’s natural-fiber dresses against her cotton-blend shirts, and the unmistakable heat of longing low in her gut when she smells Frankie’s hair.</p><p>She can’t distract herself away from it anymore, can’t smother it with something else, can’t store it up until it builds into something she can release in bed with Nick where it’s safely filed under the duties of being a good wife.</p><p>It’s not that she’s lied to herself about her desires her whole life, not exactly. She’s just been practical about them. Denying yourself things is easier than breathing when you have a long lists of tasks to complete related to being a mother, a wife, a business woman, and a functioning alcoholic. And denying yourself things means not dwelling on them. You just vaguely know there’s a spot in your brain you’re avoiding, so you cover it up in pretty curtains and divert your attention to those, instead. It’s very practical.</p><p>Until all your curtains burn down and/or are sent to prison for tax evasion.</p><p>Grace doesn’t move when Sol and Robert come in from their afternoon walk, but she notices that she has the instinct to, as if her physical closeness to Frankie shouldn’t be on display. Robert sits down and makes such a vocal fuss about Marlon Brando being gay that it apparently ruins the movie for Frankie, who stands up and demands that Grace come upstairs to finish the movie with her in bed.</p><p>With nothing else to do aside from what she actually wants to do, Grace does what she actually wants to do and follows Frankie upstairs, carrying the bowl of popcorn and a fresh martini.</p><p>Frankie is stripped of half her layers and tucked chin-high under the blankets with only her arms sticking out. She makes grabby hands again when Grace comes in, so Grace deposits the popcorn bowl right on her stomach before sliding under the covers and burrowing close enough to feel Frankie’s body heat bleeding into the sheets. They’re in Grace’s bed, because Frankie refuses to have an “idiot box” in her place of worship aka her bedroom. The screen up here is smaller than the one downstairs, but that doesn’t keep Frankie from being so entranced by Marlon Brando’s arms or whatever that she doesn’t even notice Grace taking a single popcorn kernel and putting it in her mouth.</p><p>It hurts her teeth, and she honestly doesn’t like the taste, but somehow it makes her happy all the same.</p><p>A few minutes later, the bowl is on the nightstand next to the contact solution and sleep mask and earplugs that Grace doesn’t have to hide away in a drawer every morning anymore. Frankie rolls over onto her side and places her licked-clean hand on Grace’s chest. On some level, Grace is used to this kind of touching by now, because it’s how Frankie is with everybody. On another level, it still makes Grace’s heart race, because it’s not how <i>she</i> is with <i>anybody</i>, because it’s too close to being touched by a woman, because it’s accidentally the thing she <i>desires</i> in the part of her brain she’s so, so used to denying the existence of.</p><p>Breath incriminatingly short, Grace pulls the collar of her shirt to the side so that Frankie’s fingers are no longer staining the fabric. Instead, her greasy, spit-wet fingers are flat on Grace’s skin. Grace blinks slowly at the tv screen, noticing the longing in her gut and the peculiar trusting feeling of putting herself in Frankie’s hands, so to speak.</p><p>“If Marlon Brando really was gay, why didn’t he just come out?” Frankie says, clearly still hung up on a thing that had completely slipped from Grace’s mind. It happens a lot. “It’s not like the people who count even care.”</p><p>“I think that’s simplifying things a little, don’t you?” Grace says between sips from her martini. Tilting her head up for a drink brings her double-chin in contact with Frankie’s thumb. It feels like exposing a jugular to a knife, but in a strangely exciting way.</p><p>“I’m just saying. If everybody in the closet just came out all at once, then there wouldn’t be a need for a closet anymore, would there?”</p><p>It strikes Grace that Frankie is still talking about Robert and Sol. Six years later and her ex-husband is still her biggest frame of reference for coming out as gay, her most direct interaction with any kind of closeting. Grace forgets that sometimes, until moments like these.</p><p>“Maybe there are ways he benefitted from being in the closet that you’re not aware of, like job security, social status, safety, self-esteem.”</p><p>“You’re telling me Marlon Brando had self-esteem issues?” Frankie’s fingers curl around Grace’s collarbone, pinning her like a butterfly for dissection.</p><p>“No, I’m just saying maybe you don’t know what you’re talking about.” Grace puts her drained glass on the bedside table, observing all the ways her body is telling her to panic. She chews and swallows a well-soaked olive.</p><p>“Bullshit. I’ll have you know I’ve had sex with at least three to five women.”</p><p>This isn’t news to Grace, so she only chokes a little. “Clearly very memorable experiences.” She knows that if she had ever had sex with a woman, the memory would be burned into her retinas and carved into her bones and much more work to forget than it takes to deny herself things, as much a part of her as the memory of the smell of her college best friend’s sun lotion trapped under her own fingernails or the tacky catch of her thumbprint on the magazine pictures she used to look at for hours because she wanted to grow up to be as pretty and sophisticated as Hedy Lamarr or Kate Hepburn. There are some things even eighty years can’t erase.</p><p>Frankie slithers somehow even closer. There’s an odd quiet moment before she talks. Those are as rare as they are loaded. Even before Frankie opens her mouth, Grace knows they’re not talking about Robert and Sol anymore. “Sex is always more memorable when it’s with someone that you love.”</p><p>Grace closes her eyes, letting herself feel the twin surges of longing and panic without giving herself over to them. She’s never really let herself think of what she might be able to have with Frankie, never let herself imagine what might happen if she followed the line attached to the hook that sometimes snags in her chest when she looks at Frankie. She wants Frankie’s company and Frankie’s laughter and Frankie’s unspoken, soul-deep understanding and Frankie’s crazy ideas and Frankie’s startling moments of upsettingly accurate intuition and Frankie’s hair in her face when she falls asleep- and she has all of those things. She’s gotten each of those things when Frankie decided <i>she</i> needed them- never because Grace <i>asked</i> for them or <i>imagined</i> getting them.</p><p>She waits for Frankie to laugh or make a joke, because Grace has been called a frigid, hard, cold-hearted bitch her whole life and doesn’t expect that to stop being a punchline anytime soon.</p><p>But Frankie doesn’t say anything. And the silence is strangely familiar, bringing back every other time Frankie has fallen quiet and solemn, every time Grace has simply needed her purely- support and presence, sharing space without talking about the gigantic continents shifting in their lives.</p><p>It’s weird how little it scares Grace that this might be one of those times.</p><p>Grace opens her eyes and tilts her head to look into Frankie’s, but they’re closed, lashes fluttering, breath coming out soft and even- peaceful- against her hand and then out across Grace’s breastbone.</p><p>Grace kisses her brow, feeling it wrinkle and then smooth out under her lips, which suddenly feel like they have ten times more sensory nerve endings than ever before. Her lungs feel heavy with fluid, a sudden pneumonia of vulnerability, drowning in the fragility of wanting. The thought of Frankie wanting the same thing is the only fresh air, and she coughs and chokes her way in search of the possibility.</p><p>Frankie kisses her, soft and dry, but that’s not what makes her cry. It’s Frankie’s hands, wide, bony, and hunting, spread across her lower ribs, grabbing her where her breath hides, somewhere between her hard-earned waist and her hard-earned boobs and all the other places she’s used to being touched.</p><p>“Ah.” The sounds falls out of her like she’s just been stabbed, which it sort of feels like, gushing wound at her solar plexus. Pinned like a butterfly, caught in her desire.</p><p>She always thought Frankie’s kisses would taste the way her neck smells, but it’s different, earthier and somehow younger.</p><p>She always thought it would be sloppy, Frankie’s tongue passive and wet, her hands grabby and greasy, but it feels more like being completely encompassed and safe.</p><p>She always thought Frankie would laugh her way through anything in the bedroom, but she actually just hums to herself, curiously, the way she does when she’s painting something but hasn’t decided what it is that she’s painting yet.</p><p>“I’ve been wanting to do that a long time,” Frankie murmurs thoughtfully against Grace’s lips. Grace is the one to laugh, because there’s no way that Frankie knows what wanting something for a long time means.</p><p>She places one hand on Frankie’s beautifully long face, and one hand in her thick waves of hair, feeling a skull somewhere under all of it. She’s afraid to put her hands anywhere else, until the moment when she’s suddenly not.</p><p>Maybe she should feel bad for not asking, but Frankie is here and soft and open, and so Grace finds her way under Frankie’s skirts, between her narrow legs, resting her cheek on the loose skin pooled over the hard muscle of Frankie’s thigh, brushing her shaking hand across the front of Frankie’s high-waisted white underwear and the dark gray curls of hair sticking out at their edges. She laughs again, unable to believe some aspect of this scenario, unable to slow down enough to figure out which aspect it is.</p><p>“Oh, that’s good,” Frankie says decisively, words that have been spoken to Grace a dozen times over, which she always used to measure herself by, which made her feel good about herself, but never just plain <i>good</i>, like they do now. Frankie smells terrifyingly appealing for someone who probably hasn’t showered in days, and it’s so infuriating that Grace surges forward to mouth and lick punishingly across that white cotton, seeking out some sort of explanation, for <i>why she smells so good</i> or <i>why eighty years</i> or just <i>why</i>.</p><p>Grace catches herself a little when Frankie reaches down and presses a small jar of jam-lube into her hand. They both laugh- or is it breathing- while Grace struggles to prop herself up on her elbows and twist open the jar at the same time. Grace’s throat tickles with amusement at the fact that Frankie knows where Grace keeps her lube, and the Grace uses Frankie’s special-recipe lube, and that they’ve been dancing around this for years, and what if they’d been doing this since they were fifty-</p><p>She sticks her hand under the waistband of Frankie’s underwear and drops her head down atop the flat, heaving plane between Frankie’s breasts, where layers of fabric pillow the bones of her skull. She grinds through them, tossing her head, while pushing her hand down into the hot, damp folds that she’s thought about hundreds of times, if only because Frankie wouldn’t stop <i>talking</i> about her sex life with the vibrator they jointly invented.</p><p>Grace bites down on a layer or two of fabric whose absence won’t be noticed as her slick fingers sink down into Frankie, searching and finding a softness that splits her own heart in two.</p><p>“This is crazy,” she says to Frankie’s sternum, an unidentified compulsion to discredit anything she ever wanted.</p><p>“It is,” Frankie sighs, bucking into Grace’s hand, coarse hair scraping against the heel of her palm. Grace tests the give of that flesh under the pads of her fingers, under the hard edge of her nails, under the broad sweep of her knuckles, and it all takes her breath away.</p><p>With determination she hasn’t felt in decades, she decides to make Frankie come better than any man ever has.</p><p>It works.</p><p>She’s pulled up into a kiss. It happened so fast, she’s still busy sweeping her fingers through it all, trying to figure out what she’s done, what Frankie is feeling. But Frankie kisses her so deeply, she’s brought back into her own body instead of Frankie’s.</p><p>“Have you ever read the Kama Sutra?” Frankie asks when Grace pulls back to catch her breath, her incriminating, hot breath that feels more like a bodily fluid than anything Grace has released in years. She wraps her wet hand around the rucked-up skirts of Frankie’s clothes, digging her nails into her palm through the layers and holding her own hips high so as not to hurt Frankie’s softest bits with the tough denim of her jean.</p><p>“No, I haven’t,” Grace answers with a fake-apologetic tone, stopping her breath from catching too much.</p><p>Frankie grabs her by the hips with a shaking grip. Grace’s knee gives in easily, and she’s between Frankie’s legs. It feels like she’s been here a thousand times. It feels like she’ll be here a thousand times more.</p><p>“Then I’ve got a thing or two to teach you,” Frankie whispers into her mouth.</p><p>Grace waits until Frankie looks up at her, a window to glimpse those shining irises and those sweetly round pupils. She can’t believe that she’s here, but she can’t imagine being anywhere else in the world. “Yeah, right,” she dares.</p><p>When Frankie rolls her over onto her back, they’re both laughing, and the sea is surging outside, and Grace feels the weight of her limbs and her worries and her years of longing sink into the mattress, and she wonders if this is what meditating is supposed to be like.</p>
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